Leveraging AI Imagery: A Game-Changer for Independent School Marketers
For schools in the Independent sector, the role of imagery for marketing purposes is not to be underestimated. The uses range from captivating websites to engaging social media posts and these visuals play a crucial role in attracting, informing, and persuading prospective families to choose the right school for their child. But with the advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI), the possibilities for enhancing imagery have expanded exponentially. In this blog, we will explore how independent school marketers can leverage AI imagery to tell compelling, personalised, and impactful stories.
Understanding AI Imagery
Many schools new choose to focus their creative efforts on video, as this provides additional dimensions to stories told, including a moment that can be captured, curated and shared with the school’s key stakeholders, in a fraction of the time it takes to produce a video.
Before delving into its applications, let's briefly discuss what AI imagery actually is. AI-powered image processing algorithms can analyse and interpret visual content with exceptional accuracy and speed. These algorithms can perform tasks such as image recognition, object detection, and facial recognition and even generate entirely new images based on learned patterns. By harnessing the power of AI, marketers can unlock a myriad of opportunities to enhance their visual content and deliver tailored experiences to their key stakeholders.
Using AI tools like PhotoShop’s generative fill, or AfterEffect’s content-aware fill, marketers can also alter elements of an image, such as removing parts, recolouring or even expanding the existing canvas.
Personalised Visual Experiences
One of the most significant advantages of AI imagery for independent school marketers is the ability to create personalised visual experiences for prospective families. By analysing data such as browsing behaviour, dwell time, demographic information and past interactions, AI algorithms can dynamically generate imagery that resonates with individual preferences and interests. For example, an AI-powered website could showcase images of specific extracurricular activities based on a visitor’s indicated interests, making the experience more relevant and engaging.
Numerous social channels and scheduling tools now incorporate AI to provide captions based on the imagery uploaded. While this is a great time-saving exercise, AI captioning should only form the foundation for your story, as you will need to ensure the caption is as relevant as possible, and as ever, incorporates your school’s #BrandedHashtag strategy.
Enhancing Visual Content
AI can also be used to enhance the quality and impact of visual content. Advanced image processing algorithms can automatically adjust aspects such as brightness, contrast, and colour balance to ensure that photos and videos are visually appealing and consistent with your brand's aesthetic. Additionally, AI-powered tools can remove unwanted elements from images, apply artistic filters, or even generate realistic composite images that depict hypothetical scenarios, such as students participating in innovative learning activities.
They say a picture paints a thousand words, so it’s important that the ‘words’ told in your visual story are not ‘needs redecorating’, ‘unhappy children’ or ‘ew… that’s gross’. For this reason, PhotoShop’s AI tool ‘Generative Fill’ should be utilised by school marketers in a variety of ways:
Remove children whose parents have not given permission for their image to be shared
Remove elements of images that do not represent the school in the best light such as pupil’s hand gestures (or those pesky nose-pickers!)
Airbrush elements of your facilities that may benefit from a small paint job or a crack that may need filling
While AI imagery is a hugely valuable tool for Independent School Marketers, it should not be used as a replacement for authentic photography of your school community, facilities and events. The use of any AI tool, such as Generative Fill, ChatGPT or GoogleBard, does come at the expense of authenticity, either through tone of voice or capturing a totally unique and real moment.
Incorporating AI imagery into your marketing strategy can unlock a wealth of opportunities to create an engaging and impactful visual experience for prospective families, and ensure you are reflecting the school in its best light.